Rebecca Covaciu, a Romanian child, holds out against a life of persecution and hardship. A “sad” journey from Arad to Milan, Avila, Naples and now Potenza.

Miguel Mora: Potenza, July 13th, 2008

At 12, Rebecca Covaciu - big eyes, white teeth, beautiful smile – has lived through and seen so much, that if she could write, she would write a good book of memoirs. Rebecca is a Romanian girl of the Roma ethnic group and she has spent half of her life out on the street. She has slept in a van, in a makeshift shelter and on the floor. On some days she has begged on the streets of Spain and Italy with her parents. At other times she has seen her makeshift shelter destroyed; she has been attacked by Italian police officers; she listened (hiding under a blanket) as her father was beaten up after he attempted to defend her; she has seen babies and children die due to a lack of medicines; she shared the fear of the Roma people fleeing from Ponticelli (Naples) when their camp was set fire to. But Rebecca held out. And she moved Italy with her story. A letter in which she sums up her dreams: a job for her father and the chance to go to school.

Rebecca revealed her talent in her simple letter entitled “Dear Europe” and a series of drawings, “The Mice and the Stars”, innocent and floating, but really special, just like Rebecca herself. That’s how Rebecca is: instead of letting this “life of sadness” get her down, she herself shouted out to the world her Dickensian story, transforming it into a concentration of justice and hope. To her secret dreams of going to school and finding jobs for her parents “so we don’t have to beg any more”, she adds another, even greater dream: “for Europe to help children who live on the street”.

Rebecca is happy now. For the last few days she has lived, dreamt and been drawing in a small country house in a village in the Basilicata region, a mountainous, agricultural area 250 kilometres south of Naples.

Evening falls and the light of the ancient Roman Lucania is a splendid sight. Rebecca and her father Stelian, open the door to us, a smile on their faces. Her mother Giorgina offers us Turkish coffee and a slice of cake, and the child goes to fetch her folder of drawings. Slowly and proudly, but without self-importance: “Some coloured trees, an angel, an Italian beach, some children swimming in the sea, a prince and a princess, a girlfriend and boyfriend (Italians), two doves, a vase of flowers, a necklace designed by Versace, and fruit, lots of fruit…

Rebeccca left her village, Siria, a hamlet of Arad in the Timisoara area, five years ago. She now speaks Romanian, Rromani, Italian and a little Spanish. “I learnt it in Avila when we lived in Spain”, she explains in Italian. “We didn’t have a home and we had to sleep in the van. I attended the third year of junior school there, I remember the teacher very well. She was very fond of me and she liked my drawings”.

The child is the family leader. And an important part of its future. Apart from her talent for drawing - acknowledged by Unicef last May when she was awarded the “Arte e Intercultura Caffè Shakerato” Prize in Genoa - Rebecca is a sweet, polite and sensible child. While she talks without stopping, like an open book, her father, Stelian (aged 43), a former farm worker and evangelical pastor, her mother Giorgina (aged 37); her brothers Samuel (17), Manuel (14) and Abel (9) and Samuel’s partner, Lamaiza (16) who is expecting a baby, watch her with a mixture of surprise and deference, as though she were a stranger. And in some way, she is.

Foto El Paìs - CARLES RIBAS - 13/07/2008

The Covacius arrived at the house at night. They arrived by train, a long journey from Milan. A few days before Stelian had been beaten up by four police officers. “They threatened reprisals if I reported them”, he remembers. He did report them and the family was forced to pack their bags and leave.

Now, while he attempts to get over the fright and pain from the beating, Stelian, a man who sounds like he’s on the verge of tears when he speaks, says he is “happy, thanks to God and these Italian people who have been generous enough to let them use their home”.

He is referring to G. and A. a middle-aged couple that lives in Potenza, the chief town of the region. “We read about Rebecca’s story over the Internet, and immediately decided to put them up in this house that is unlived in,” they explain. Now the Covacius have a home, with a contract of free rental for a year. G. and A. prefer not to have their names made public. “We don’t want to be turned into the media’s prototype of the sympathetic Italian family”. But their altruism has put a smile back on the faces of Stelian’s children.

The family had not slept under a proper roof for five years. “In Siria, in Romania, we had a home, but we had nothing to eat”, explains Rebecca, “we ate thanks to charity from our neighbours. Then in Milan, my parents were unable to find work”, she continues without making a big thing of it, “and we had to go out and beg. We couldn’t go to school because we didn’t have a home. But now they tell me I’ll be able to go to school”.

In order to attend school the Covacius had to show they have a fixed address and that they are registered at the local registry office. This is one of the reasons the Italian Government has elaborated the controversial headcount of the Roma community. Of the 140,000 gypsies who live in Italy, half of them are Italian citizens and a third of them are Romanians. Fifty per cent of them are underage. Many of them have not had the opportunity to attend school.

Like other fellow countrymen and brothers of the same ethnic group, the Covacius drove their van through Hungary and Austria to Milan in search of a better life. After a few months spent unsuccessfully trying to make their fortune, they decided to try in Spain. “A friend who lived in Avila told us he had a home, papers and work, but we arrived too late. We enrolled our children at school, but we were unable to find work. So we went to Torrelavega where we remained for two months. Then we came to Milan.”

Giorgina speaks Italian, a little Spanish and a bit of French. She has also lived in Germany. “Samuel was born there in 1990. We were happy there, but after two years they stopped paying us welfare benefits and sent us back to Romania”. Even if she describes herself as being “half Roma and half not” she has ten gold crowns on her teeth. “They only cost ten euros each!” she defends herself laughing. “A doctor from Siria passing through Milan did them for me, they’re all the fashion in Romania now. The only one who refuses to have them done is Rebecca”.

Things didn’t go too badly at first in Milan, Rebecca recalls:

“We built a shelter from cardboard and plastic under a bridge in the Giambellino district”. It was a small squatter settlement where five other families from Timosoara lived. “To eat we used to go out begging at the antiques market. Only for a few hours, to make enough for the children to eat”, assures her mother lowering her gaze. As we can see from Rebecca’s drawings, she too went out begging on “sad days”: her brother, who they call Ioni, played the accordion.

A year ago, Roberto Malini, leader of EveryOne, (a recently formed NGO for the defence of human rights which is helping about 60 Roma families in the Milan area) bumped into the Covacius. “I saw a group of people insulting a helpless young Roma boy holding a dog who was staring up at them terrified”. The child was Abel, the youngest Covaciu boy. “They were accusing him of stealing the dog and were about to lynch him. We tried to calm people down and at that moment the child’s mother turned up with the dog’s papers. They had brought it from Romania with them”. EveryOne saw to the basic needs of the Covaciu family when they began to realise that some people in the country were tired of the Roma. “We are scared of the police and the Italian people are scared of us. That’s how it is”, says Giorgina.

According to the latest Eurobarometer on discrimination, the Italians are the Europeans who, (along with the Czechs) feel most disgust for the Roma people. 47% of the Italians interviewed said they would not like a Roma for a neighbour. The sensation is increasing all over Europe, even if the average percentage of intolerance in the EU is only half that figure: 24%.

Fear has taken possession of a lot of people over the last eight years. Already back in 2000 (before the latest elections won by Silvio Berlusconi) the Northern League of Roberto Maroni, the present Interior Minister, launched a furious campaign against the Roma people. They used slogans that have been heard over and over again since the Roma arrived in the West around the 15th Century: they rape and kill our women, they steal from our homes, they are work shy and don’t want to go to school.

The long list covers more prejudice and accusations that complete the picture. The average life expectancy of a Roma living in Italy has fallen to 35. Their infant mortality rate is ten times higher than that of non-Roma children. And according to research carried out by EveryOne and Opera Nomadi, when analysing the state and local authorities archives from 1899 to the present day, no “gypsy” has ever been sentenced for kidnapping a minor.

“The strategy of hatred was put into effect and it brought in a lot of votes for the Lega and the Right”, recalls Malini. “The Roma went from being considered a nuisance to being the main target for the “security emergency”. Now the official order is to save Roma children from the mice and exploitation by their parents. In order to achieve this praiseworthy goal anything goes: the police can persecute them, they can apply discriminatory measures like fingerprinting and even take children off their parents by accusing them of begging or theft, and taking them in front of the juvenile courts. We have reported various cases of children being taken from their parents in Naples, Rimini and Florence. So who’s stealing whose children?”

Another option consists of bulldozing the squatter camps and inviting the “invaders” to return to their own country. On April 24th the police prefect of Lombardy sent the bulldozers to the Milanese district of Giambellino with a large number of policemen in anti-riot gear. The tiny settlement where the Covacius lived was destroyed in one minute. “It was a brutal camp clearance”, recalls Malini. “They forced them to leave their makeshift huts and lined them up to contemplate the destruction”. Rebecca adds: “They told us we couldn’t gather our things together because with the new government in power we would have to leave Italy”. The Covacius and other five families lost everything. “For a few days we slept in the Casa della Carità, then Roberto sent us to Naples”, she says.

When the train arrived down south, an organized mob, (some say sent by the Camorra) attacked and burnt down the camp at Ponticelli where 700 people were living. “We were sleeping in a school, there were a lot of Romanians”, recalls Rebecca. “The women told us they had been very frightened. People came and looked through the windows and shouted at us: Get out of here, gypsies, go back to your own country!”

They returned once more to Milan. Rebecca continued to draw, the Government announced its emergency measures - which were rejected by the European Parliament earlier this week. As well as princesses and imaginary beaches, Rebecca paints her own life. Images of marginalization, the diaspora, begging. EveryOne entered the drawings for the 2008 Unicef prize. Out of 150 entries, Rebecca won the prize with her “Mice and Stars”. “I did that series of drawings because Roberto asked me to, he was the first to notice my artistic talent. I drew more of them and he published them on his web page and I was awarded the prize and this medal”.

For a day the media transformed her into the little Anne Frank of the Roma people”. Her drawings were shown at the art exhibition “Psyche in Chains” inaugurated on Holocaust Memorial Day in Naples. And they are on show as a testimony against racial segregation at the Hilo Museum of Contemporary Art, in Hawaii.

After this brief moment of fame, the Covacius put up their new tent in the San Cristoforo area. On the morning of June 17th, two men approached the tent and without saying a word started hitting Ioni and Rebecca. Their father tried to defend them and he too was beaten. The NGO decided to take their story to the papers. Two police cars returned to the site. “They were the same men as the day before, but this time they were in uniform”, says Rebecca. “I went into the tent and covered myself with a blanket. The police took Daddy away and started beating him up. I could hear him shouting very loudly”.

“Head injury due to aggression” is what was written on the doctor’s report at the Casualty department he was taken to, and where he received a visit from more police officers. The message was quite clear: “If you report it, we will be back”. Mr Covaciu decided to report it, but this meant having to leave the city and go into hiding. And that’s when the benefactor from Potenza appeared on the scene. “When the state ill-treats people in this way, the result is solidarity”, thinks G.

The Covacius arrived in this splendid region of Italy at night. Only two kilometres away is a quiet town, a country school and a priest, Don Michele. “The Covacius’ story proves we have no integration policy in Italy”, he explains. “It all depends on people’s voluntary work. Like the Bible, it is a story of emigration, but God is not frightened.”

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